Upcoming Events: Cyberscholar Working Group at Yale (6/11); Going Home? The immigrant experience through film (6/17)

The Cyberscholar Working Group is a forum for fellows and affiliates of MIT, Yale Law School Information Society Project, Columbia University, and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University to discuss their ongoing research.. Each session is focused on the peer review and discussion of current projects submitted by a presenter. Meeting alternatively at Harvard, MIT, Yale, the working group aims to expand the shared knowledge of young scholars by bringing together these preeminent centers of thought on issues confronting the information age. Discussion sessions are designed to facilitate advancements in the individual research of presenters and in turn encourage exposure among the participants to the multi-disciplinary features of the issues addressed by their own work.
This month's presentations include:

(1) "Five Algorithmic Cultures and Their Ontologies: A Performative Critique" with Esteve Sanz, Thomson Reuters Fellow at the Information Society Project of the Yale Law School; (2) "Social Patterns of Digital Thanks, Acknowledgment, and Attribution" with Nathan Matias, a PhD student at the MIT Media Lab; and (3) Kate Darling, Research Specialist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab and a Fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the Yale Information Society Project, on content production incentives in the online adult entertainment industry.
more information on our website>

The documentary film Home focuses on Victor Sossi, a European immigrant who has lived in North America for several decades. His nephew Dino traveled to Europe to discover the reason why he has never returned.

Home focuses on the tension between a younger generation's need for self-discovery and an older generation's wish to move on. Shot throughout Europe and North America, Home explores issues of personal identity, memory and collective grief.

The screening of this rough cut for the Berkman Luncheon Series will involve a Q&A with the filmmaker and an opportunity for audience members to provide feedback for this work-in-progress. For more information, please visit http://www.TheHomeFilm.com

Dino Sossi has produced media for AOL, CBS newsmagazine “60 Minutes,” CNN, The New York Times and VH1 at Viacom. His documentary films have screened at festivals in New York and Los Angeles as well as Berkeley, Cambridge, Columbia, Harvard, Oxford and Pennsylvania. Dino’s work has been broadcast on CBC, CTV, DiscoveryUSA, Globe & Mail, IFC, Life, MTV Canada, MuchMoreMusic, One, Pridevision and PrimeTV. His digital storytelling has been exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
RSVP Required. more information on our website>

From Jim: We now wander in Best Buy, Lowes and on Amazon and buy all sorts of devices from thermostats, hi-fi gear, tablets, phones, and laptops or desktops as well as home routers to build our home networks. Most of these we plug in and forget about. But should we?
"Familiarity Breeds Contempt: The Honeymoon Effect and the Role of Legacy Code in Zero-Day Vulnerabilities", by Clark, Fry, Blaze and Smith makes clear that ignoring these devices is foolhardy; unmaintained systems become more vulnerable, with time.
Structural issues in the market make the situation yet worse, as pointed out in Bruce Schneier's Wired editorial in January: "The Internet of Things Is Wildly Insecure — And Often Unpatchable", which I instigated and fed Bruce the ammunition. "Binary blobs" used in these systems have the net effect of "freezing" software versions, often on many year old versions of system software. Even if update streams are available (which they seldom are), blobs may make it impossible to update to versions free of a vulnerability.
There are immediate actions you can personally take, e.g. by running open source router firmware in your network, but fixing this problem generically will take many years, as it involves fundamental changes and an attitude change in how we develop and maintain embedded systems, and hardest, changes in business models to enable long term support of popular hardware.

Jim Gettys is an American computer programmer. He coined the term "bufferbloat" and has organized efforts to combat it in the Internet (see gettys.wordpress.com), and has been working on home routers.
RSVP Required. more information on our website>

Cloud-based ed tech facilitates educational innovation -- such as new connected learning frameworks -- but also poses privacy challenges as more and more potentially sensitive data about students goes into the cloud. In this talk the Student Privacy Initiative team presents recommendations from their recent report, Framing the Law & Policy Picture: A Snapshot of K-12 Cloud-Based Ed Tech & Student Privacy in Early 2014, to guide policy and decision-makers at the school district, local, state, and federal government levels as they consider cloud-based ed tech.
video/audio on our website>

Other Events of Note

Local, national, international, and online events that may be of interest to the Berkman community:

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The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University was founded to explore cyberspace, share in its study, and help pioneer its development. For more information, visit http://cyber.law.harvard.edu.